


A Farewell to The Clone Wars

by The_Violet_Howler



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Essays, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24026923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Violet_Howler/pseuds/The_Violet_Howler
Summary: My reaction to the finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	A Farewell to The Clone Wars

Yesterday was the end of an era

After 11 years and 104 days

After a theatrical movie, a novel, a comic miniseries, 8 incomplete story reels, and 133 episodes

After 49 hours and 12 minutes of incredible, heartbreaking, beautifully animated television….

Ended, The Clone Wars have.

I watched all of the existing Star Wars movies on DVD when I was a kid, but I was never particularly enamored with them the way that others are. And then in August 2008, I went to the local movie theater with my grandmother to see an animated movie that – while I didn’t know it at the time – would chart the course of my future for years to come.

While a lot of the general Star Wars fandom looks down on the theatrical Clone Wars movie as weak and lackluster, 11-year-old me loved every minute of it. I’ve been obsessed with animation my entire life, and around 2 years before the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I had just begun to explore the world of animation outside of my childhood Disney bubble, diving headfirst into SpongeBob and Avatar and Codename Kids Next Door. Whenever I saw commercials for an animated movie playing in theaters I would beg my family to take me to see it. It didn’t matter what the movie was actually about, all that mattered was that it was animated and I thought it looked fun.

So, when I saw Star Wars: The Clone Wars in theaters with my sister and my grandmother, I _loved_ it. I enjoyed the movie so much that when I learned there was going to be a TV show following the movie, I was ecstatic. From the moment that the first episodes of Season 1 aired on Cartoon Network a few months later, I was hooked. From the very beginning I refused to miss a single episode. From middle school all the way through high school The Clone Wars became the axis around which almost all of my entertainment consumption revolved.

I started reading more Star Wars books and comics from all over the timeline. The Thrawn trilogy. Darth Bane. Fate of the Jedi. The Old Republic. Lost Tribe of the Sith. I devoured every piece of Star Wars media I could find as this show awakened in me an appetite for all things Star Wars. Whenever my parents asked for gift ideas for my birthday or Christmas, at the top of my list would be the latest season of The Clone Wars on DVD. Every summer I trawled the internet looking for news from Star Wars Celebration or San Diego Comic Con about the next season – trailers, clips, plot details, whatever I could find.

When the show was initially cancelled following the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, I was devastated. This show had such a staple of my life that the idea that it wasn’t going to be coming back _hurt_. As I started looking around at online Star Wars fandom to find someone, _anyone_ , who felt the same way that I did, I discovered #SaveTheCloneWars, and joined the campaign. Through that first year after the plug was pulled, I wrote to Disney asking them to continue the show. I signed fan petitions and made posts on Facebook. It was my first real engagement with the wider online fandom.

Then came The Lost Missions and the Clone Wars Legacy releases – Crystal Crisis, Son of Dathomir, Dark Disciple… Having more Clone Wars stories helped soften the pain of the show’s loss, but the story still felt incomplete. Hearing about future arcs that had been planned for the show only added to the sense of incompleteness, knowing that there were more stories we didn’t get to see. When rumors had begun circulating about an animated Star Wars show set post-Clone Wars, resolving unanswered questions of The Clone Wars was at the top of my wish list for a future Star Wars show.

When Rebels was announced I was cautiously optimistic. I didn’t want to get attached to a new set of characters when the loss of Ahsoka and Rex and my other Clone Wars favorites still felt so raw. After Dave Filoni and the production crew of Rebels posted videos introducing the crew of the Ghost and the core cast of Rebels I reluctantly became more interested, I still was cautious about investing my time in this new show out of fear that it too would be ripped away from me without a proper conclusion just like The Clone Wars was.

So, when the final episode of Rebels’ first season confirmed that the mysterious Fulcrum was none other than Ahsoka Tano I was out of my seat cheering. There were still questions I needed answered about what happened to her after she left the Jedi Order, but the fact that she was there, back on my TV screen once more, was a relief. And when I watched the first trailer for Season 2 a month later, the words “My name is Rex,” made me scream and cry. I was overcome with tears of joy knowing that not only would my favorite Jedi be appearing in Rebels but my favorite Clone Trooper as well.

By the time Rebels’ first season had ended, I was getting ready to graduate from high school and planning where I would go to college in the fall. Taking art electives in high school, particularly a computer art class during the airing of Season 5, made me appreciate just how beautiful the show’s art style was, and when the time came for me to plan where I wanted to go to college, I chose schools that had programs for animation. I had originally wanted to be a game designer because of Kingdom Hearts, but The Clone Wars made me realize that the passion I truly wanted to make a career out of was animation.

I continued to follow Rebels as I went off to college, and by the end of Season 3 – with Maul dead for good, Ahsoka MIA, and Rex and Hondo as the only major Clone Wars characters left on the show – I had gotten attached to the Rebels characters as well. I was just as invested in their fates as I was for those of Clone Wars characters like Rex and Hondo. Season 4 finished airing at the end of my junior year, and the knowledge in the final five episodes that Ahsoka had not only survived her confrontation with Anakin at the end of Season 2 but that she was still alive years after the events of the original trilogy had me crying tears of joy as I went to sleep.

The trailer announcing the return of The Clone Wars had me in tears for hours. Long had I been dreaming of the remaining stories of this show being released in some form. I would have been content with more novels and comics like Son of Dathomir and Dark Disciple, but to have the show return in animated form was a miracle I had given up hope for years ago.

But within the last twelve months, my interest in Star Wars cooled.

I was never the biggest fan of the movies. Revenge of the Sith was my favorite because in the absence of a proper conclusion it functioned as a de facto finale to The Clone Wars. I enjoyed the original trilogy, but they were never movies I considered my favorites. I saw The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in theaters and cried on my first viewing of both films, but on repeat viewings the magic of them faded and I lost interest. While I could understand why other fans liked them, there was a spark that was missing from most of the movies released under Disney that prevented them from really having any staying power for me.

And then The Rise of Skywalker came out and completely shattered any expectations I had that Disney really knew what they were doing with the franchise. Where before I was willing to trust that there actually was a plan because of how precisely Rey and Ben Solo’s arc followed the path of the Heroine’s Journey across The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, now I realize that what I initially believed to have been a carefully planned narrative arc was most likely JJ Abrams planning to set up a conventional Hero’s Journey which Rian Johnson used to try and tell a Heroine’s Journey instead. And even if there _was_ a plan for Rey and Ben Solo that got screwed around by behind the scenes conflicts, there was clearly no plan as far as Poe and Finn and Rose were concerned.

For months after this, I started questioning and doubting my love of all the canon Star Wars media. How could I enjoy anything in the Original and Prequel trilogy eras knowing that all the hard work of dismantling Palpatine’s empire would be undone in order to rehash the same plotline with new characters and no concern given for whether the audience could follow what was happening or why these events and character decisions mattered if they hadn’t read every comic and novel and played every video game connected to this era.

Since the last trailer for the final season of The Clone Wars went up on YouTube, I vacillated between enthusiastically sticking to the shows I loved regardless of my problems with the film saga, and abandoning the franchise altogether and gifting my Clone Wars and Rebels Blu-Ray sets and associated novels to my college friend who had just gotten into Star Wars.

And then ‘The Phantom Apprentice’ Happened.

Ahsoka and Maul’s two-part duel in the throne room and the rafters of Sundari reminded me of everything I loved about The Clone Wars in the first place. The animation. The art style. The music. The attention to detail on every character and in every detail. The tragedy of what was to come. On my third re-watch of the third-to-last episode of Season 7, that was when I realized that despite my problems with the Sequel Trilogy, despite the many flaws in the writing of the Prequel movies, I could never give up on The Clone Wars, or on Rebels. These two shows have meant too much for me to ever walk away from either of them.

I have cried at least ten times in the last five days watching the final two episodes of The Clone Wars. The final of this incredible series was such a gut punch even though I knew what was coming and who would survive. I had and saw so many ideas about what the last episode would include. Would their be a montage of all the Jedi who survived Order 66 as a mirror of the death montage in Episode III? Would Ahsoka and Rex receive Obi-Wan’s recorded message from Rebels warning surviving Jedi to stay away from the temple?

But in the end, none of those things happened. The focus of the episode remained on Ahsoka and Rex. Their escape from the ship. The tragedy of their inability to save the other clones. And ending with a shot of Vader finding the ship some time later, all these symbols of the Republic buried beneath the winds of time as the empire rises. It was bleak and depressing and when the credits rolled I was holding back tears. But looking back on the entire series and the era of the war, knowing what was coming, there was no other way I could have expected it to end. The audience already knows that this is not the end, but Ahsoka and Rex don’t know that, and so the finale of The Clone Wars reflects this. The pain and despair. The tragedy and confusion over what will happen next. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Despite all the movies I’ve watched; the comics and novels I’ve read; the video games I’ve played; very few things in Star Wars canon or Legends have been able to match the magic of The Clone Wars in my heart. I have never truly been a Star Wars fan so much as I have been a Clone Wars and Rebels fan. The novels and comics and movies I enjoy are an extension of my love for the shows, but the shows will always come first. The characters these shows introduced have stuck with me more than any characters from the movies ever has. Clone Wars made me love Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padme and Yoda, but to me, my Star Wars favorites have always been Ahsoka, Maul, Rex, Ventress, Fives, Hera, Zeb, Thrawn, Sabine, and all the rest.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to Dave Filoni, Ashley Eckstein, Matt Lanter, Catherine Taber, James Arnold Taylor, Sam Whitwer, Nika Futterman, Dee Bradley Baker, as well as every single person involved in bringing this show to live for all the hard work and passion you have poured into this series. Your work on this show shaped the person I am today, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

May the Force Be With You.


End file.
